1 Education and Early Career

Bozarslan was born in a village in Lice, north of Diyarbakır. His father was a village imam (mele) and with that background it was normal for Mehmed Emin to seek a traditional Islamic education. Formally the medreses had been closed since 1924 but in various parts of Kurdistan modest versions of the traditional medrese long continued operating, supported by voluntary contributions from the villagers.³ This education took the feqî (medrese student) to a number of different medreses, in different parts of the Kurdish region, to benefit from the special knowledge of their seyda (teacher) until he had mastered the entire curriculum. As late as the mid-1970s I found that village imams who had this background and thus not only knew the Islamic texts but also were aware of the geography and social conditions of different parts of Kurdistan were more trusted than any modern-educated outsiders.

Bozarslan believed he belonged to the last generation to have studied in the traditional medrese style and that younger men could only attend the state schools that were taking its place.⁴ From the 1950s onwards, the number of state schools for the education of imams and preachers (imam-hatip okulları) expanded rapidly. Because they combined a general curriculum with Islamic subjects, their students did not master Arabic and the classical texts to the same level as the feqî, but graduates received a diploma with which they could find employment as state-salaried imams and preachers. (The traditional mele received his sustenance from the villagers.) Like others of his generation, Bozarslan managed to find employment in the ranks of Turkey’s religious institution (Diyanet) after teaching himself Turkish, studying secondary school textbooks, and passing an external state exam. He was an assistant mufti (müftü) in several places in the Kurdish region, and by the early 1960s had become the mufti of Kulp, not far from his place of origin Lice. (The mufti is traditionally an expert on Islamic moral and legal teachings, appointed to answer questions on religion. In Republican Turkey, the müftü heads the provincial or district office of Diyanet, the müftülük, and has various administrative tasks.)

Two other feqîs of his generation and similar experience had also been involved with the DDKO and were again to briefly play prominent roles in the Kurdish movement towards the turn of the millennium: Abdurrahman Durre (1930–2013) and Feqî Hüseyin Sağnıç (1926–2003). Durre had not only been a feqî but had actually taught in a medrese as a seyda before passing a state exam and becoming a müftü (1962–1975). He allegedly lost his position because of his Kurdish nationalist views, surviving as an Arabic-Turkish translator. Sağnıç had spent a shorter period in the medrese and was somewhat disaffected by the absence of non-religious subjects in the curriculum. He learned Turkish during military service, which allowed him to broaden his reading about various subjects including other religions. Both were among the founders of the first legal Kurdish cultural institution in Turkey, the Mezopotamya Kültür Merkezi (Mesopotamian Cultural Centre, MKM) in 1991, the first place in Istanbul where Kurdish courses were given.⁵ Durre later led a more or less PKK-affiliated association of men of religion.⁶ He also published an edition and analysis of Ehmedê Xanî’s Dîwan (collection of poems), perhaps in emulation of Bozarslan’s pioneering work on Mem û Zîn more than three decades earlier.⁷ Both insisted on the “natural” and “rooted” quality of the Kurdish spoken and written by medrese graduates, as compared with the more artificial Kurdish used by university graduates, who thought in Turkish before translating their thoughts into Kurdish.⁸

Sağnıç and Durre both were, at least for some time, active in various PKK-aligned civic associations. Bozarslan’s activism always remained cultural and was for most of the time independent of organised politics, apart from a brief period in 1970 as a founding member of Dr. Şivan’s Kurdistan Democratic Party in Turkey (TKDP).⁹ He was very much aware of the political struggles and debates of the 1960s, however, which constituted the context that gave his work its significance. He was not primarily interested in the struggle for some form of autonomy or independence but was firmly committed to safeguarding Kurdish language, literature, and history, and to the struggle against the structural inequality that kept much of Kurdistan backward.¹⁰ He identified the religious and tribal elite of Kurdistan as the chief agents of this inequality and wrote his first books against them.

It was as the mufti of Kulp that he wrote İslâmiyet Açısından Şeyhlik-Ağalık (The Position of Sheikhs and Aghas According to Islam, published in 1964), a fierce indictment of the power these elites held over the rural masses. There was no basis in the Koran or the life of the Prophet, he argued, for the claims to superiority of the sheikhs, the leaders of Sufi orders, or the seyyids, the alleged descendants of Muhammad. Their followers kept people in a state of dependence by spreading tales of miracles they performed and promising that on the day of resurrection the sheikh would carry his disciples to Paradise. Most sheikhs were also, like their allies the aghas, big landlords and demanded feudal services from the peasantry. Since Turkey had become a multi-party democracy with periodical elections, sheikhs and aghas had found news ways to strengthen their position by allying themselves with political parties and demanding that all their dependents, entire districts, voted for the party of their choice.

The book had the effect of a bombshell and caused controversies in which emotions ran high. Sheikhs and aghas had been denounced before by Turkish secularists, but this was the first time that Islamic arguments were being used against them, by someone with religious legitimation and speaking on behalf of the masses of the region. (Similar arguments had been used by Muslim modernists elsewhere though.) Sheikhs, seyyids, and aghas and their partisans declared that Bozarslan had become a Wahhabi or even an apostate from Islam. Mehdi Zana, who at that time was organising a local branch of the socialist Workers’ Party of Turkey (TÄ°P) in Silvan and invited Bozarslan to come and speak about his book, writes in his memoirs that local conservatives called for Bozarslan to be killed as an apostate, but that there were also a few progressive meles who sympathised and spoke up for Bozarslan. Zana claims that it was mainly those meles and sheikhs who identified with the emerging left and Kurdish movements who were swayed by Bozarslan’s argument, while those aligned with the state remained fiercely opposed.¹¹

As a result of the controversy, the mufti of Kulp (as by now he was widely known) lost his position: he was dismissed by Diyanet. Bozarslan moved to the city of Diyarbakır, where he opened a bookshop, Şafak Kitabevi, and in 1966 published his second book, Doğu’nun Sorunları (The Problems of the East). “The East” (Doğu) was the common euphemism for the forbidden name Kurdistan, and the book was nothing less than a detailed overview of the social and economic conditions of Turkish Kurdistan: the unequal division of land, unemployment and smuggling, widespread poverty, illiteracy and superstition, the lack of proper schools and roads, the ban of public use of the mother tongue, poor hygiene and health care, underdevelopment and the absence of trust between the people and the state. These were themes that in the following years were taken up in Kurdish protest rallies in the large cities (the “Doğu mitingleri”) and by the DDKO, and on which a few years later Ismail Beşikçi’s most controversial early work focused.¹²

Bozarslan’s bookshop soon became a meeting place for people from all over the region who were concerned with the Kurdish question. It was the only bookshop where the few existing books in Kurdish could be found, and it placed Bozarslan at the heart of a network of Kurdish intellectuals and activists.¹³ He did not stay long in Diyarbakır, however.

2 Bozarslan in Istanbul

Bozarslan fought his dismissal from Diyanet in court and won his case. He was reinstated as a mufti but posted as far from Kurdistan as possible, in the European part of Turkey (Şarköy, on the Straits of the Dardanelles). From there he often visited Istanbul and developed a network of contacts in Kurdish and leftist circles in the metropole. This is where his next books were to appear, which were even more explicitly Kurdish than his earlier work.

He had long been working on the text that Kurdish nationalist intellectuals considered as the Kurds’ national epic, Mem û Zîn, written by Ehmedê Xanî towards the end of the eighteenth century. It had been printed, in the Arabic script, by a Kurdish cultural association in 1919 but during the suppression of everything Kurdish most copies of the book had been destroyed. Bozarslan worked from a handwritten copy of this early print, which he transliterated and translated into Turkish. The impact of his 1968 edition of Mem û Zîn, with the Kurdish text in Latin script and the Turkish translation on the facing page, can hardly be overstated. It showed to Turks as well as Kurds that a venerable Kurdish literary tradition existed. Bozarslan and the publisher decided to omit several “offensive” passages in the introduction of the work but leave the blank spaces. Thus they drew attention to the existence of passages where Xanî appears to call upon the Kurds to unite under their own sovereign.¹⁴ This apparent self-censorship did not prevent the public prosecutor from seizing all copies of the book at the printer’s and starting proceedings against Bozarslan. The book circulated underground for several years (and so did the censored passages, copied by hand into the empty spaces), and after the amnesty of 1974, copies that the publisher had been able to hide resurfaced on the book market. It has since been reprinted several times.

In the same year Bozarslan published a Kurdish alphabet, a simple book with pictures illustrating the meaning of Kurdish words beginning with A, B, C, etc., of the kind that children all over the world use to learn to read and write their mother tongue. Bozarslan’s Alfabe was immediately banned and the author was arrested. The socialist journalist and publisher Doğan Özgüden happened to have a trial hearing on the same day that Bozarslan appeared before the judge and gives an interesting account of the interaction he witnessed.

The judge, a relatively open-minded man, asked the accused if he wanted to say something. Bozarslan said: “To judge whether there is any punishable offense in the book, it is necessary to have read its contents. Does the prosecutor know Kurdish?” The prosecutor answered that its being published in Kurdish constituted a crime in itself. But the judge said, “In that case, let’s have an expert investigate the book. Can you suggest a person who can read Kurdish?” When the prosecutor could not answer this question and Bozarslan was asked if he could suggest a name, he mentioned Ahmet Aras, who not long before had written an article titled “The Question of the East in Socialist Perspective” in Özgüden’s journal Ant. Thus it was decided that Aras was appointed to read and report on the book.¹⁵

The alphabet nonetheless remained banned and Bozarslan spent four months in jail for this little book alone.

While the trials for these books dragged on, Bozarslan’s contacts with progressive journalistic and publishing circles in Istanbul also offered new opportunities. As the only person in these circles who was fluent in Arabic he became a commentator and publicist on Middle Eastern affairs in various media, including Ant. It was also Özgüden who published Bozarslan’s next book, which concerned the politics of Islamic internationalism, Hilafet ve Ümmetçilik Sorunu (The Caliphate and the Question of Striving for Unity of the Umma). This book was a response to the Islamic Summit Conference in Rabat in 1969, the first such event in which Turkey took part at the ministerial level. Bozarslan was the first in Turkey to argue that the conservative Arab Islamic regimes were in fact clients of US imperialism and that recent efforts to unite the world of Islam were in fact counter-revolutionary initiatives. The book documented the political economy behind the Arab monarchies and their Islamic Conferences.¹⁶

Bozarslan’s own international political sympathies were clearly elsewhere, as is also clear from the books he chose to translate. These were texts by anti-imperialist Third World leaders, including Nasser’s Philosophy of the Egyptian Revolution, Nehru’s Social Revolutions and National Struggles and Palestinian leader Nayif Hawatme’s People’s Struggle in Palestine and the Middle East (the latter two were published by Özgüden’s publishing house Ant).¹⁷ In the mid-1970s, when the Lebanese civil war broke out, he wrote a book about the historical and social backgrounds to the conflict, with an overview of responses in the Arab world, Savaşan Lübnan (Lebanon at War). By then Ant no longer existed, and he established his own publishing house, which he significantly named Üçüncü Dünya Yayınları (Third World Publications). For much of the 1970s he was to work as a newspaper journalist specialising in Middle Eastern affairs.

Kurdish history, however, remained his chief concern. In 1970, the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TÄ°P) adopted at its fourth congress a resolution affirming the existence of the Kurds as a people and the national oppression to which they were subjected. Bozarslan suggested to his publishing house Ant, which was broadly supportive of the TÄ°P, that this was the right time to publish another Kurdish classic, to show that the Kurds have a long history and the Kurdish question deep roots. The Sharafnama, written in Persian in the late sixteenth century by the Kurdish emir of Bitlis, Sharaf Khan, had recently been translated into Arabic, and Bozarslan proposed to translate this classic into Turkish. Ant brought it out in two volumes in 1971.¹⁸ Not long after the military coup of that year, Ant was closed by the authorities and the book could not be properly distributed. Bozarslan was jailed for Kurdish separatist activities, and Özgüden (against whom a total of 195 years imprisonment was demanded) went underground and fled to Europe.

The next book on Kurdish history on which Bozarslan had been working could only be published after the end of military rule and the proclamation of amnesty for most of the political prisoners. The Ta’rikh Mayyafariqin was an Arabic chronicle of the Marwanids, a Kurdish dynasty that ruled present Silvan and Diyarbakır in the eleventh century. It was a relatively unknown work, known to specialists only from an English summary that had been published in 1903, but Bozarslan got hold of a printed edition of the entire text that had recently been published in Lebanon and translated it as Mervaniler Tarihi (1975).

The third important book he translated from Arabic was a Kurdish-Arabic dictionary that had been compiled in the late nineteenth century by an Ottoman official who had served as the governor of Mutki in Bitlis, the Palestinian Yusuf Diya’ al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi. This Kürtçe-Türkçe Sözlük became, and remained for quite some time, the only serious Kurdish-Turkish dictionary that was widely available in Turkey.¹⁹ In 1992 it was superseded by Ä°zoli’s more comprehensive Ferheng, and it took two more decades for the first volume of Bozarslan’s own, even more ambitious, four-volume dictionary to appear.

In ten years’ time, Bozarslan had made more significant contributions to the Kurds’ knowledge of their history, language, and literature than anyone else. But in 1978 tragedy struck. His eldest son Gani (b. 1952), who had already established himself as a revolutionary poet and translator, was found murdered under circumstances that were never elucidated. It was believed to be one of the many political assassinations of those years. Mehmed Emin was devastated, and by the end of 1978 he left Turkey and sought asylum in Sweden. His eldest daughter, Sureya, had been living there for a few years and his second son Hamit moved there too before his father. In early 1979 his wife Fatma joined him with the other five children.²⁰

3 Bozarslan in Sweden

Adapting to a new environment after a painful loss must have been difficult but he received some help from other Kurds who had moved to Sweden before him and advised him to become a member of the Swedish Writers’ Union. Not long after his arrival he learned that Ä°smail Beşikçi had again been sentenced to three years imprisonment for one of his books, on the “Turkish history thesis.” He used his contacts at the Swedish Writers’ Union to start a campaign of letter-writing to UNESCO and other international organisations in support of Beşikçi.²¹

Whatever changed with his move to Sweden, one thing did not change: Bozarslan’s discipline and work ethic. In less than two years after his arrival in Sweden, he began to publish books at an amazing rate. He had written short stories in Turkish before: his İçerdekiler ve Dışardakiler (Those Inside and Those Outside) was based on his own prison experiences and those of fellow prisoners and people living in fear outside under military rule, and Anarşistler (The Anarchists) was a humoristic short story about the hunt for leftist activists in those years. In Sweden, where Kurdish was not banned as in Turkey but rather stimulated under the government’s multicultural policies, he wrote almost exclusively in Kurdish.

The switch to Kurdish had in fact begun in Istanbul, where his last book was a collection of stories in Kurdish, Meyro. A reprint of this book was his first publication in Sweden (in 1981). He followed this up with a series of books of animal tales or fables (meselokên lawiran) and other genres of folklore as well as anecdotes about actual people and events. Altogether he published some twenty such books, all of them in Kurdish, in as many years. This made him a pioneer of the revival of Kurmanji writing in Sweden. Before him, only the journalist Mahmut Baksî had published two children’s books in Kurdish: Zarokên Îhsan (1978) and Keça Kurd Zozan (1979), following this up with an attempted novel, Hêlîn (1984). Mehmed Uzun published his first novel, Tu, also in 1984 and the next two, Mirina Kalekî Rind and Siya Evînê later in the same decade. It was only in the 1990s that there was a substantial literary production in Kurmanji, by such authors as Mehmed Uzun, Fırat Cewerî, Malmîsanij [Tayfun], Rohat [Alakom], Murad Ciwan, and Zeynelabidîn Zinar.

The first thing that struck me about Bozarslan’s Kurdish books was that he did not write in the form of Kurmanji, based on the Cezîre dialect—which the Bedirkhan brothers had established as the standard and which was used in most other early publications—but that he deliberately used another dialect variant, with many words I could not find in any dictionary. His texts did not appear to be transcriptions of recorded narratives by villagers, as an academic folklorist might publish them, but his own retellings of things he had heard in the language of the common people among whom he had long lived. He privileged the vernacular language in a double sense: Kurdish instead of Turkish, and the Kurdish of the villagers among whom he had grown up rather than the more elite variety that the Bedirkhans had attempted to impose as the standard. It is consistent with his conception of the role of the vernacular intellectual, which pervades his work from the first books onwards.

Bozarslan meanwhile continued working on two other long-term projects, which had already been on his mind in Turkey: the edition of the most important Kurdish journals of the early twentieth century and a comprehensive Kurdish-Turkish dictionary. Few copies of the journals Kurdistan (1898–1902), Kürd Teavün ve Terakkî Gazetesi (1908–1909) and Jîn (1918–1919) survived, and no library had a complete set, so he had to acquire photocopies of the issues existing in libraries in different countries. These journals were partly in Ottoman Turkish, partly in various Kurdish dialects, and all in Arabic script. Bozarslan opted to publish facsimiles of the original journals, with transliterations of the Ottoman Turkish and Kurdish texts, and translations of all in modern Turkish. This was a massive work that took him many years, but it was an important achievement that enabled Kurds who did not read the old script to reconnect with earlier phases of the Kurdish movement that had been cut short by the victory of the Kemalists, Turkish nation-building, and assimilation policies.

He had begun work on the dictionary in 2001; the first of its four volumes was published in 2011 and the final one in 2021. It differed from other Kurdish dictionaries that had recently appeared in that Bozarslan only listed words that he had actually encountered in classical Kurdish literature, in folklore, or in the actual speech of Kurdish villagers. The compilers of other dictionaries, as Roşan Lezgîn writes in a review of Bozarslan’s work, had started out with a Turkish dictionary or list of words, for which they sought or invented Kurdish equivalents. (This is even partly true of Ä°zoli’s otherwise useful Kurdish-Turkish and Turkish-Kurdish dictionary.) Lezgîn, a Zaza speaker and prolific author himself, has other issues with Bozarslan over his selection of spoken Kurdish, but he praises the work as based on actual rather than invented speech.²² It is the only monolingual Kurdish dictionary: all words and their semantic range are explained in Kurdish, with examples of their usage and notes on etymology and authors in whose work they are found. The four-volume entire set amounts to 3,760 pages. Bozarslan later complemented the dictionary with a handbook of Kurdish idioms (Îdîyomên Kurdî).

4 Conclusion

Mehmed Emin Bozarslan’s contributions to the Kurdish cultural and political awakening in Turkey and the diaspora can hardly be overestimated. Thanks to him, several generations of Kurds became aware of, and could actually read, important classics of Kurdish literature and history as well as the cultural and political debates in Kurdish circles before the Republic. He produced a substantial corpus of printed works in vernacular Kurmanji and was one of the main contributors to reviving written Kurmanji as a living and developing language.

Apart from his historical significance as an actor of the Kurdish awakening, his work is also of lasting importance to scholars. His translations of Mem û Zîn and the Sharafnama may in due time be superseded by better editions and more elaborate commentaries, but his editions of Jîn and the other early journals remain essential sources for historians of that period. His retelling of folklore and anecdotes in vernacular Kurdish may constitute useful source material for historical and comparative linguistics. His dictionary especially is an indispensable tool for anyone seriously studying texts in Kurmanji—perhaps not perfect, but unlikely to be improved upon anytime soon.